The 20-year-old Medina County Recycling Center that processes the trash from every home and business in the county is at a crossroads, says Solid Waste Coordinator Bill Strazinsky, and not only because he is retiring after running the plant since it opened.

A Technical Advisory Council has just been formed, in response to a state mandate to review solid waste management, and to help determine the future of the plant and recycling in the county. Its first meeting was Thursday.

Working with a consultant, the 12-member committee and county officials will need to make a decision by next summer on whether to upgrade the recycling center; stop using a contractor to staff it and take over all operations; sell it to a contractor; or scale back or abandon it and begin a curbside recycling program, Srazinsky said.

Currently, Envision Waste Services employs 72 people to operate the plant off Lake Road near Interstate 71 and U.S. 224 in Westfield Township. Envision receives nearly all of the plant's revenue -- $800,000 to $1 million a year. The company's contract with the county expires in January 2015.

"Salaries would go up if the county took over operations, and it has to be determined if that is a viable option," Strazinsky said. "We also know the facility, which cost $8.2 million in 1993 and will be paid for in January, needs about $3.3 million in upgrades."

Every trash hauler working in the county is required to empty its trucks at the facility, which will sort 126,000 tons of trash this year. The cans, plastic, newspaper and cardboard -- about 5,000 tons a year -- are compressed into bales and sold to recyclers.

Two-inch and smaller debris is composted -- 50 tons a day -- and used by landfills to cover their trash piles at the end of each day. Six-inch and larger non-recyclables are trucked to a landfill in Richland County about 40 miles away.

And plastic bags and small pieces of paper are baled and sold as "engineered fuel," which burns nearly as hot as coal.

All told, the facility reduces the amount of Medina County trash ending up in a landfill by 18 percent. It also prevents about 13,000 tons of yard waste from going to a landfill by composting it behind the facility and selling the finished product to the public.

The processing center has attracted 28,000 visitors from 26 countries since it opened in July 1993.

"We were unique when we first got started, and being county owned, the building has always been open for tours," Strazinsky said.

His last day on the job is Friday, Oct. 11, and the 67-year-old said he wishes he could have stuck around for the changes that are coming. But a knee surgery looms, and he and his wife want to move to Texas.

Strazinsky's boss, Medina County Sanitary Engineer Jim Troike, said Strazinsky's "dry humor has been appreciated, especially through trying times when a little levity brings back a healthy perspective."

More trying times are ahead. The county's solid waste consultant, G.T. Environmental, will present its report to the new advisory council and the county's Solid Waste Policy Committee at a joint meeting Nov. 5, months before the state Environmental Protection Agency expects to announce its new solid waste mandates.

"The EPA director said they were going to gut the rules and reform the program," Troike said. "They were supposed to have the draft changes out this past spring, changed the date to summer and now are saying sometime next year.

"We are hoping to get some indication of what they are going to change before we finish our review. We'd hate to take a direction and find that we have to change because of changes in the law."

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